Director of Public Prosecutions v Ridge, Stuart
[2012] VCC 1859
•26 November 2012
| IN THE COUNTY COURT OF VICTORIA | Revised Not Restricted |
AT MELBOURNE
CRIMINAL DIVISION
Case No. CR-12-00975
| DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC PROSECUTIONS |
| v |
| STUART RIDGE |
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JUDGE: | HER HONOUR JUDGE GAYNOR | |
WHERE HELD: | Melbourne | |
DATE OF HEARING: | ||
DATE OF SENTENCE: | 26 November 2012 | |
CASE MAY BE CITED AS: | DPP v Ridge, Stuart | |
MEDIUM NEUTRAL CITATION: | [2012] VCC 1859 | |
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
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APPEARANCES: | Counsel | Solicitors |
| For the DPP | Mr G. Hayward | Alexander Lew |
| For the Accused | Mr D. Sala | Melesecca, Kelly & Zayler |
HER HONOUR:
1 Stuart John Ridge, you have pleaded guilty before me to two charges of trafficking in a drug of dependence, three charges of possessing a drug of dependence and a summary offence of using a drug of dependence, namely amphetamine, which has been uplifted for hearing in this court pursuant to s.145 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2009. The facts underlying your offending are as follows. You and another man, Daniel Francis Brown, were the targets of a major drug operation called Operation Refife conducted by police in May 2011 into the sale and distribution of crystal methylamphetamine, that is ice, in and around the Bendigo region.
2 From March 2011, you and Brown lived together in a unit in Golden Square until August of that year when Brown moved into a house he bought in Bendigo and you moved to a serviced apartment. Between 7 September and 25 November 2011, telephone intercepts revealed that you regularly bought – obtained ice and other drugs from Brown which you would sell to others and then pay Brown later in advance of obtaining more drugs. These facts underlie charge 1, trafficking in a drug of dependence, that is methylamphetamine. In that time you and Brown contacted each other over 1000 times, the vast majority of those calls clearly relating to drug trafficking. It was ascertained that most of the conversations were related to ice.
3 On two occasions the purchase of ketamine was arranged. These actions underlie charge 3 on the indictment, possession of a drug of dependence, namely ketamine. On average you purchased drugs from Brown a couple of times a week and records kept by you showed you bought it in amounts of between three and a half to 14 grams, usually the latter. You paid Brown $6000 for 14 grams of ice. In the 79-day period covered by the indictment, when amounts of cash were discussed between the two of you, the amount you agreed to provide Brown totalled over $40,000. It is said that in that time you sold most of what you brought from Brown to other people but consumed the remainder yourself and the $40,000 referred to by the Crown is said to be money received from the sale of drugs by you.
4 Police searched your home on 25 November 2011 where they discovered ziploc bags containing white crystals and a container of white paste amounting to a small quantity of methylamphetamine in your pantry and next to your bed which facts underlie charge 4 on the indictment, possession of a drug of dependence. They also found a bag of seven pills which you later told them was ecstasy you had available for use and sale. Records you kept showed four dates where you had ecstasy pills available for sale and you agreed you had sold pills two weeks before. These facts underlie charge 2 on the indictment, trafficking in a drug of dependence, MDMA, and also to charge 5 on the indictment, possession of a drug of dependence, MEDMA.
5 Drug paraphernalia including cutting agents, scales and deal bags were discovered, you telling police that scales obviously were used to check drug weights when you bought and sold. Numerous documents were located under a false floor of a cupboard, together with financial records which you agreed indicated you were trafficking over the relevant period, showing 13 occasions where Brown supplied you with amounts of ice, generally in half ounce purchases of $6000 and revealing 15 payments made by you to Brown of amounts ranging between 900 and 4500 dollars in respect of the ice supplied by Brown to you in that time. Those records also revealed at lease 19 different customers who made at least 82 purchases from you and that 83 payments were received by you. During the time period in the indictment you were unemployed but sustained weekly living expenses of about seven to eight hundred dollars a week and a drug habit, 300 to 2000 a week whilst on a Centrelink Income. In what was a fairly frank interview with police, you agree you had been purchasing and selling these drugs, mainly ice, as well as using amphetamines on a regular basis and that admission underlies the summary charge, using amphetamine. You have been remanded in custody since your arrest on 25 November 2011.
6 I now turn to your personal circumstances. You are 39 years old, were born in Corowa, New South Wales where your father worked for the Rural Land Protection Service and was a Justice of the Peace and your mother a nurse. You have one sister from whom you have been estranged for some years and two half siblings born to your mother. You had a reasonably difficult home life in that your father was excessively strict and doled out harsh physical punishment, including hitting you with objects and punching you. In addition, from the ages of seven to 12 you were sexually abused by your mother’s cousin who would stay with the family. That cousin is apparently been goaled now for other child sex offending.
7 At about the age of 15 in 1988, when you were attending Wangaratta Technical College you were run over in a motor accident, hospitalised and had to undertake rehabilitation for three months and were on crutches for a year. You made some attempts to return to school but never really did so on a regular basis. You began a boilermaking apprenticeship in Corowa which ended after three and a half years when you were aged 19 and the business closed down. At the age of 20, you began a series of transitory jobs such as labouring, odd job work, working as a cellar barman and holding down numerous such jobs in Victoria and New South Wales. At the age of 17, you bought a house in Corowa around the corner from your parents as a result of a significant payout as compensation for your accident. You moved into that house about a year after you bought it and it became a party house, filled with friends, drinking and violence and around this time you began experimenting with drugs. You started off using cannabis but quickly gave it away, then mainly used ecstasy and other party drugs. Police often attended your home and you had confrontations with them and were charged and convicted on assault police charges.
8 You became a barman and cellarman for a golf club for 12 months, then undertook numerous odd jobs labouring and so forth and when you were 20 entered your first serious relationship with a woman named Renee with whom you had two children, your son Beau, now 17, and your daughter Jia. Eventually you sold your home and bought a farm in the Barossa Valley, when you were about 25, as a means of starting afresh with Renee who was unhappy with your hard-drinking, drug-taking lifestyle. This did not work out and she returned to Melbourne after about six months and you kept the farm on for about another three to four years. Your parents had, by then, moved to Batemans Bay and you re-engaged with them when your father developed cancer, living with them for a number of years and helping them with a fresh seafood business which they ran and which, apparently, prospered.
9 Then when you were about 29 or 30, a serious rift developed between you and your parents, when you opened a franchise business, a spud bar, in Chapel Street, Prahran. You sold your farm and invested about three to four hundred thousand dollars of your own money; your parents put in about $200,000 but you began having problems with the business landlords and the franchise agreement. As the moneys invested by your parents were linked to their home, they became afraid they would lose their house and intervened and ultimately the franchise was handed to them and you excluded from the business. You had continued using drugs and abusing alcohol heavily throughout your 20s although you stopped drinking much about two years before being arrested for the offences before this court. When things started going wrong with the business in Prahran, your sporadic use of amphetamines developed into an entrenched habit and you began using it daily, smoking one to two grams a day, and this habit went on for some years, to the time of your arrest.
10 In 2008, matters had so deteriorated your parents took out an intervention order against you and in July of that year you received a three month sentence of imprisonment for breaching the order, stalking, threatening to kill, resisting police, recklessly causing injury as well as possessing amphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy, trafficking in amphetamine, trafficking in cocaine, trafficking in ecstasy and dealing with property being the proceeds of crime. By this stage, you had lost all the money you had received from your compensation in your late teens with which you bought the house and the farm and then placed in the business. Your counsel told me your parents continued with the business for some years afterwards and you became extremely embittered towards them and to this day believe they ripped you off.
11 At the time that you breached the intervention order you were living in an almost transient fashion around the St Kilda area and maintained this lifestyle for some years using heroin, dabbling in other drugs such as ecstasy and cocaine and trafficking in those drugs to support your own habit. You were placed on a community based order in addition to the three months sentence of imprisonment which you breached by engaging in driving offences and further trafficking in cocaine and amphetamine and were placed on a five months intensive corrections order, which you successfully completed, but once it was done relapsed into drug use, still living in the St Kilda area.
12 You and your then-girlfriend, also a drug user, travelled to Tasmania, under the influence of drugs, taking with you a suitcase containing ecstasy which was discovered on your arrival by police. You received a nine month sentence of imprisonment in Tasmania and were released on the early release scheme in February 2011. On your release, you resumed contact with Mr Brown, an old friend from Corowa, and after travelling in Queensland and living in Melbourne for a short period, eventually moved to Bendigo at his behest in about July of August of 2011. You had no money and the visit was to be a short-term one You knew Mr Brown was trafficking in drugs and within two months became involved in it yourself and the offending which I have outlined then occurred.
13 Most of what you earned in the trafficking enterprise was spent on your drug use. Your counsel told me that at the time you took the view that the easier the drugs were to get, the more you would use, as did your girlfriend and a third party you were living with. The idea was, apparently, to run the enterprise for as many months as you could, living a hedonistic lifestyle involving the use of drugs of up to $2000 a week. Very little money that you made was recovered as you sold most of the drugs in order to support your habit and most of what you made went into your habit.
14 You have been in jail since November 2011, as I said, during which time you have worked at a powder‑coating factory there, using your welding skills, and working as a leading hand, five to six days a week. You are currently employed in a specific area of the jail to build an oven, and in the time that you have been in jail have ceased using drugs, and I am satisfied of that fact by the urinalysis testing which has always proved negative.
15 You have taken as many courses as you possibly can, and I received numerous certificates showing you had completed a depression program, a Certificate II Kitchen Operations program at Kangan Institute, obtained a Certificate II in Engineering, undertook a problem‑solving program, a release-related harm-reduction program, a certificate in work safety, and you have also completed a number of programs run by the UnitingCare Moreland Hall alcohol and drug agency at the Melbourne Remand Centre, involving a number of counselling sessions. The last of the urinalysis reports I received was dated 13 November 2011 and I am satisfied that whilst in jail you have done everything you possibly can by way of courses and by abstinence from drugs to rehabilitate yourself.
16 I also received a psychological report from Psychologist Michelle Wauchope dated 12 June 2011 which explored thoroughly the issues which arose from your background. You are now completely estranged from your parents and siblings and remain considerably embittered towards them in relation to what you regard as their use and misuse of the compensation moneys you received as a teenager. It was Dr Wauchope’s view that you have suffered ongoing psychological difficulties arising from your relationship with your parents, the harsh physical discipline meted out by your father, and in particular, the sexual abuse endured by you at the hands of your adult cousin which was unreported, undiagnosed and untreated.
17 She said you had a range of significant unresolved emotional issues, addictive behaviours and habitual responses that were impacting on your functioning, thinking and behaviour. You also acknowledged to her the destruction that drugs had brought to your life. You told her you couldn’t think of one positive effect that it had had; that it had, in fact, negatively affected your relationships, your finances, your children, your parents, your health and your well‑being. You reported, however, having little difficulty in abstaining from drug use in jail, which Dr Wauchope considered to be a most positive sign. She believed that you needed, on release, to immediately attend to your drug problems and that you need long-term specialist counselling and close monitoring in the community.
18 Testing showed you suffering from moderate levels of anxiety and depression and you told her you believed you had been suffering from these symptoms for as long as you could remember. She was concerned that your continuation in jail would exacerbate those problems. Evidence was called from Dr Joe Lamberti, a drug rehabilitation specialist whom you have contacted with a view to setting up some sort of regime of rehabilitation once you are released from jail, and I received evidence from a longstanding friend, who is a self-employed carpenter, who is prepared to offer you labouring work with him whenever you are finally released from prison.
19 So you have, very sensibly, made plans for your release as well as doing everything you can in jail, and it is my view that you have got reasonable prospects of rehabilitation, and it is my view that you are a person who is perfectly capable of carving out a productive life for himself once you leave jail. You have got the energy and wherewithal to do this and I am satisfied to a fair degree that you have reached a point in life where you have decided to tackle the issue of drug use. It was a fairly repeated theme in your conversations with Dr Wauchope that you felt your life was passing you by. Certainly, you have reached an age where you do need to make some sort of decision about this. I do not need to tell you that otherwise you are going to have a shortened life expectancy and your life will be punctuated by regular periods in jail.
20 I agree with Dr Wauchope about the need for fairly intensive therapy, and again that seems to be something that you are now open to. I am impressed with your efforts in jail, the working habits you have established, the courses you have undertaken, and I am satisfied you abstained from drug use. I am satisfied, further, that the trafficking you did engage in, though large scale, was primarily to fund a habit which had reached fairly grandiose proportions and that, really, you were living in some sort of unrealistic bubble, if you like, where you had access to drugs in almost unlimited quantities and at the time you were supplying what your counsel termed “the party houses around Bendigo”.
21 Against this, however, is the fact that you did engage in quite a purposeful and organised way in large‑scale trafficking and with no indication that this business was going to do anything other than continue on for as long as it could. There is no question in my mind, and indeed there is no question in anyone else’s mind either, that the only appropriate way I can deal with you is by a sentence of imprisonment to be immediately served. I make the point, although I am simply repeating what many judges have said over and over, that drugs reek absolute havoc and misery in the community, and indeed you now seem to recognise that drugs have wreaked absolute misery and disruption in your own life.
22 It does seem to me there is a fairly clear path leading from your childhood to your substance abuse, but that does not excuse this latest enterprise. You may now realise the futility of your existence as it was and wish to do something about it, but you first have to serve your time, the time which the law clearly says must be imposed upon you for that enterprise. I have been moved in the course of the plea conducted by counsel to take the view that a longer than normal parole period is appropriate in your case. This is because, as I have said, I am satisfied that you have demonstrated that you have done everything you possibly can to make your time in jail a useful one and that you have reached the stage, as I have said a number of times in these sentencing remarks, where you do intend to do something about your life and to make it productive.
23 Again, we talked about this in the plea, Mr Ridge, there are a lot of psychological problems swimming beneath the surface here. If you are going to spend the rest of your life feeling angry and embittered towards your parents, it is going to be very difficult for you to overcome these, but hopefully, given the fact that you have made it pretty clear that you intend to do something about it, that sort of therapy that you need will be attended to by you and will make your life an easier and a happy one. In the circumstances, however, as I have said, the scale of trafficking was so large that I have determined that I need to sentence you in the way that I have. I, therefore, sentence you as follows. Could you stand up, please.
24 On charge 1, you are sentenced to four years and ten months’ imprisonment. On charge 2, you are sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. On each of charges 3, 4 and 5, you are sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, and I order that two months of the sentence imposed on charge 2 be served cumulatively to the sentence imposed on charge 1, giving a total effective sentence of five years. I also sentence you to one month’s imprisonment for the charge of using amphetamines.
25 HER HONOUR: Yes. Very well. I order that you serve two years of this sentence before becoming eligible for parole and I direct that 567 days of this – no, beg your pardon. How much is it?
26 MR SALA: We would appreciate it, but it’s 367.
27 HER HONOUR: I am sure you would like the five. 367 days of that sentence have already been served by way of pre‑sentence detention. Very well. So you have got about a year to go. Pursuant to s.6AAA, I declare that had you not pleaded guilty, I would have sentenced you to a term of imprisonment of six years and order that you serve a minimum term of three years and six months. All right. Good luck, Mr Ridge.
28 PRISONER: Thank you.
29 MR SALA: AS Your Honour please.
30 HER HONOUR: Yes. Thank you very much. Before you take Mr Ridge down, I am ordering that police take a forensic sample which is simply going to be a swab from the mouth. I need to tell you that should you resist that being done, police are entitled to use reasonable for to obtain it. Very well. Thank you, Mr Ridge.
31 MR HAYWARD: Your Honour, there was an order for disposal as well, I think.
32 HER HONOUR: Yes. I’m going to sign all those. I’m just doing that now.
33 MR HAYWARD: Thank you, Your Honour.
34 HER HONOUR: What’s the date today? 26th. Very well. They are all done. Thank you.
35 MR HAYWARD: Thank you.
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